@The Natural Born Runner and
@Readybodisready
Here's the first real PPV star of the lighter weight divisions;
"Showtime Event Television (SET) and KingVision expect to exceed last year's Chavez-Hector Camacho fight, which generated a 4.2 percent buy rate, or more than 800,000 purchases, said Suzan Couch, the senior marketing consultant to SET. But a lower 3.7 rate, or 740,000 buys, was figured by Paul Kagan Associates, a media research firm."
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/09/10/sports/view-from-pay-per-view.html
"King has to hope that buyers will view Chavez-Alli as the equivalent of the Chavez-Greg Haugen and Chavez-Hector Camacho fights, which drew buy rates of 3.7 and 4.0, respectively. Both buy rates are considered good for non-heavyweight fights but don't approach the best ever boxing buy rate of 8.4 for the Evander Holyfield-George Foreman fight."
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/07/s...vez-drawing-power-faces-heavyweight-test.html
"The fight generated an approximate 5 percent buy-rate, with over 1 million subscribers purchasing the fight, according to Suzan Couch, senior marketing consultant for SET. "We were marketing for a 4.5 percent buy-rate so we were very pleased with the results," she said.
Operators' estimates, however, were slightly less; they tabbed the buy-rates at below 5 percent. They said between 950,000 and 1 million subscribers bought the fight. Nevertheless, the fight, with a gross of approximately $30 million, will likely be the highest performing non-heavyweight PPV boxing event ever. …"
https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-14473863.html
Chavez was pulling 750,000 to 1,000,000 buys in these fights when PPV was only available to about 20 million homes in North America and was getting 3.7 to 5.0 percent buy rates in those fights. He also drew big numbers in some of his other PPV fights as well such as the 2.7% buy rate (or 575,000 total buys in Taylor rematch). Oscar's biggest percentage buy rates were against Trinidad at 3.6% and then against Mayweather at 4.1%. Mayweather's three biggest were against Pacquiao at 4.6%, Oscar at 4.1% and then Canelo at 2.5%. Now, it's obvious that Chavez wouldn't be able to draw those same percentages had he been around in today's era since the law of diminishing returns would be a factor. But if he could draw nearly a million buys when the available PPV audience is limited to only about 20 million, odds are pretty outstanding that he'd be able to draw some pretty incredible numbers if had the opportunity to draw from a market size of 100 million that we see in today's age.